I can tell you from experience that the biggest hurdle in developing apps for various App Stores today is administrative team that reviews apps. Sometimes it takes more than a MONTH to get your application reviewed and published - and dealing with those guys "behind the scenes" easily gets extremely stressful. If you ever dealt with PayPal support, you have general idea what I am talking about.

I've worked on mobile apps before; but they've all been proprietary and distributed by enterprise app servers, not anything publicly available to the riffraff.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt

Well, someone might assume they will become famous after releasing a popular application for an App store. Of course, they will be wrong , but then again most people who try acting or singing are driven by the same motivation and they also get disappointed.

"Too much investment"
As you correctly deduce, I have no experience in making them. So there's an expensive learning curve and capital investment. Set that against what I do now, and it's a non-starter.

"Too little return"
My younger son has been down this path, and after a few Andoid apps. has gone back to web development, having failed to come up with a killer app.

"Too short term"
It's a fast moving market. How long is the life of an average app, or even the platform upon which it runs.
The app that earns my company the most income, went out to our first customer in 1994, the same year as the first commercial SMS message in Europe and 2 years before the first in the USA.
The second earner on my company's list saw the light of day in 1988.

That's how I know.
I'll leave "App Store app development" to the others, and do what I do best.

This is where "experience" option is a better selection. While you may see a strong learning curve, you will not know unless you try. If you refuse to try then you have already failed.

How about: I have only so long to live and there are only so many experiences I can cram into that time so why should I waste my time on this particular learning curve and the investment of money (and more time) on corresponding tools for same when there are far more profitable ways to spend my remaining few moments on this earth. I don't see this as "failure"!

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While a majority of apps do not make any revenue or benefit, the assumption here would be you are doing it for the money (and not for the other reasons listed). It is a valid argument, but really only for someone who breaks down his minutes of the day into direct $.

This is contradictory; if the assumption is "doing it for the money" then how does "do not make any money" provide incentive?

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Many programmers attend seminars and conventions for the purpose of networking and getting insight into new technologies.

Quite true. Which is why I can't waste time going to seminars on things I am not planning on doing and networking with people who obviously have different interests from myself; I have only a limited time...once more.

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Considering the "App Store" idea is completely new this seems like a silly comparison.

Not at all! The fact that the App Store is a new idea (Apple's is several years old now BTW) doesn't mean that it isn't transient. Blackberry apps are dying a death as the technology expands (not necessarily improves in any real functional way) as an example. The iPad, iPhone and other iJunk are a passing fad which will be replaced soon (by Apple if not others for good solid commercial reasons ) which will make all the current apps so much junk as well! Note: Punch cards were a technology improvement when I started programming (teletype and punched tape).

- Life in the fast lane is only fun if you live in a country with no speed limits.
- Of all the things I have lost, it is my mind that I miss the most.
- I vaguely remember having a good memory...

Toy devices for fun and games. The future, as I hear, as if that kind of future had not died together with Atari and Commodore 20 years ago. I don't see much to learn here what I did not learn 20 or more years ago on the toys of that time.